Intellectual as Influencer
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The Rise of the Intellectual as Influencer
A few days ago, a young writer in Toronto named Emma interviewed me for an upcoming issue of end of the world magazine. [Update: you can now watch the interview here!] We talked about developing a creative process, the future of online writing, and that particularly nebulous pressure on writers to ‘sell’ themselves online. Afterwards, I was left wondering about the rise of the intellectual as influencer, and my anxieties around both labels.
Rebecca Jennings has written about this phenomenon at Vox, with a recent piece about how everyone’s a sellout now and another about the pressure on culture writers to chase the trendbait beat. “Journalists on the culture beat are essentially captive to whatever happens to be trending online,” Jennings writes, “in the hopes they might capitalize on its existing vitality.”
An entire creative class is exhausting itself chasing lightning in a bottle, and this pressure is only mounting. The moralization around the term ‘sellout,’ however, has others arguing that the pressure to “sell” one’s self as an artist is nothing new. Cece Xie writes, “All of these double standards and social media savvy and performative packaging of art…preceded the rise of personal branding,” noting that “for POC, there was never a time when simply being an Artist was good enough.”
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I wrote in my ArticleTok piece that by “Offering a bite-sized way to quickly engage with new viewers,” ArticleTok allows creators to signal both aesthetic and curatorial taste quickly and with less effort required than reading full books. Since then, I heard from numerous friends who said that their own feeds have been full of the same curated article round-ups, and they were feeling panicked about it:
To be honest, that same panic is what prompted me to write the piece in the first place. I had found myself compromising my writing time in favour of compiling a massive amount of tabs on my browser, which filled with me dread as they sat unread. Then I’d see others in my feed somehow making the same round-ups so quickly (though whether they were actually reading the articles or just having AI summarize them was debatable). And it’s clear why ArticleTok has taken off so quickly: one viral TikTok video can lead to thousands of new eyeballs on Substack, as was the case for me.
With the death of so many legacy media companies where young writers would typically cut their teeth working with editors on deadlines, the writers of tomorrow are getting their starts on TikTok and Substack instead. Now, influencer/ectuals represent a new kind of micro-celebrity. The tightening gap between writer and consumer in which growth is correlated to parasocial attachment may feel antithetical to the project of art-making itself, but it’s likely the future of it too. Influencers already exist outside of time, with access to an entire market of free goods and services that aren’t yet available to the wider public. The result is an anxious need for speed, in which one must not only have the most original, correct take on the prevalent discourse, but they must also be the first to share it.
The inimitable Cydney Hayes has already written plenty about this, specifically how “Every tech company starts out saying our product will change the world, and we’ve seen again and again how they turn artists into content creators and end up as screaming content farms where un-nuanced, easily digestible content dominates and corporate interests profit.” One must be both an island and a celebrity, both for themselves and for their art. But what happens when it’s also for the sake of the algorithm?
With Google introducing its new AI writing assistant, it’s worth asking ourselves whether there will even be a use for humans on the internet in the near future. Soon, we’ll all have the option of having AI write our emails, resumes, and social media comments. Or for some writers, even their Substack posts.
“The experiences of searching, reading, shopping, and wandering on the web have depended on varying extents on the presence of text and media that other users have contributed, often for free and under the auspices of participation in human-centered systems,” Intelligencer writes.
With AI amalgamating all human-effort into its own language, who would want to contribute to it? Who would want to read it? Or, as Intelligencer asks, “What happens when the text boxes can fill themselves?”
BeSoooooForReal
BeReal, which once promised its users an ‘authentic,’ anti-Instagram experience, has lost its buzz over the years, and in response, the app recently announced new ‘RealPeople’ and ‘RealBrands’ feeds for celebrity/influencer content.
Let me just say, there is simply no way any celebrity has access to a public BeReal account on their own personal phones, let alone Joe Jonas. It’s more than likely that publicists and social media managers are carefully curating a series of fun ‘moments’ for the site to drop at random times throughout the day. Does that negate the ‘authenticity’ of the app, or can we acknowledge that it was never really as altruistic as it painted itself to be?
The app continues to inch towards being just another Instagram-alternative, slowly branching out into allowing users to tag others and see photos from friends-of-friends, even releasing its own direct-messaging function. Before long, I’m sure TikTok and BeReal will release their own apps just for direct messaging, not unlike Facebook’s Messenger app. But will we even have anything left to say to each other?
TikTok Search and the Rise of Ragebait Algorithms
The other day TikTok prompted me to add its Search feature to my home screen as a shortcut. Given that Google is nearing obsoletion as it edges closer to just being another AI generator, it makes sense that TikTok would make another play for its throne as the leading search engine. Obviously this is worrisome, though, given how TikTok’s own search function is also algorithm-based. Viral engagement on TikTok depends on SEO, meaning that a video will be more successful if it prompts users to type something into the search bar immediately after watching it.
But the SEO strategy has slippery ramifications. I’ve noticed that viral videos will often have completely unrelated search prompts listed at the bottom, prompting users to click out of curiosity. For example, have you heard of Cat Janice? She’s an artist on TikTok who’s gone viral after asking users to stream her song, the proceeds of which will go to her son after she passes from her terminal cancer diagnosis. For some reason, every time one of her videos comes across my page, the search prompt at the bottom of the screen is “Cat Janice faking cancer.” It’s an eye-catching search prompt, one which I couldn’t help but click, only to realize there weren’t any actual results for it. It was just a ragebaity prompt which did its job properly: it got me to stay on the app, even for just a minute longer.
It’s not unlike how Instagram has started showing Threads (Meta’s forgettable Twitter-knockoff) within its feed, so you could be scrolling through a friends’ baby shower pictures when suddenly you’re confronted with the worst tweet you’ve ever seen, and you have to click on it to see if anyone told this person off, and suddenly you’re in yet another terrible app, following the ragebait wherever it takes you. Speaking of…
Taylor Swift, Hair Messer-Upper
On Sunday night Taylor Swift made history as the first artist to ever win four Grammy’s for Album of the Year. Swift also solidified herself as a woman who tousles the hair of her married friends. Not to #discourse but it must be bizarre to be in the orbit of someone so rich that she can just command everyone around her to behave exactly the way she wants. It’s funny, whenever those purple filter shots start to trickle out after one of her parties, I wonder why there aren’t any videos. And now we know it’s because they would all have this energy (as in, let’s-take-photos-to-prove-how-much-fun-we’re-having, rather than just, you know, having fun…).
The Tortured Billionaires Club
The only thing I have to add to the discourse about Taylor Swift’s newest millennial-coded album title is that she is very clearly longing to have the depth of lyricists like her friends Florence Welch, Phoebe Bridgers, or Lana Del Rey, but she just can’t break out of the confines of her own persona. Also, everyone’s clowning on the tortured-title and the mans who inspired it, but I will just say, when I was in university, the polisci bros had a group chat called “The Brhode’s Scholars” and they all still got laid, so.
And while the world holds its breath over whether Swift will attend the Super Bowl this weekend, some fans are struggling to defend the billionaire’s private jet usage, even when it’s in the name of blonde love. As fans wait impatiently for Swift to announce her newest re-recording so they can give her more money, I’ve seen some fans on TikTok argue that her recent overexposure and ensuing backlash has been purposefully orchestrated as an homage to her Reputation era, which is a generous way of saying that even the Swifties think it’s all been a little bit much lately. There could be upwards of three more Swift albums out in the world before the end of the Eras Tour in November, and who knows how old we’ll be by then. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find out we’ve been on the beach that makes you old all along.
The Girls Are Romanticizing the Library Again <3
A Swing and a Miss for Nepo Babies
Though Dakota Johnson usually finds herself in the unintentional Mother Zone of celebrity worship, she recently revealed that maybe she’s not as ironically disaffected as she seemed—in fact, she’s not really in on the joke at all. A disappointing turn for the woman known for defeating Ellen Degeneres and limes.
On My Reading List This Weekend
The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks (Bloomberg)
Jean Cocteau on poetry (The Paris Review)
“Preiss recalls a conversation she had with [Emma] Roberts, her best friend since they were teenagers, and the writer Ariel Levy. “Emma said, ‘I want to do for books what Kylie Jenner did for lip kits.’ Ariel was like, ‘What does that mean?’ And Emma said, ‘Well, that you have to have one.’” (archived NYT)
Exhausted by aesthetic culture (Refinery29)
So many of my writer crushes tackling the age-old question, “Is it better to desire or be desired?” Personally I’m a Magdalene J. Taylor myself. (Dirt)
An addendum for the myopia of youth piece I wrote a few weeks back: a girl-net deep dive from Lux. The piece is paywalled, but well-worth it: “Being a girl online extends the performative demands of girlhood into these for-profit platforms and mines them for ways to sell it all back to us. You have the work of being a girl and then the work of being a girl online.”
Lololol “now we know it’s because they would all have this energy (as in, let’s-take-photos-to-prove-how-much-fun-we’re-having, rather than just, you know, having fun…)” this got me so good because her crashing all the boygenius photos made me soooo uncomfortable 😂 she was the only one who looked like she was having any fun, even if that fun was purely performative 😬
I’ve been writing a lot about how AI doesn’t have a point of view because it can only express the points of view that already exist and have been stated by someone, online or in a digital space the tool can crawl for content. We’re already in such loud echo chambers online, where the same things circulate, that I’m more afraid that most folks won’t notice when robots start writing the essays instead of real human writers.
Great piece, as usual!!